The Star News

The Witness performed at Central Lutheran Church

by Britt Aamodt

Sunday’s performance of “The Witness” at Central Lutheran Church in Elk River asked audience members to reconsider common beliefs about homelessness.

Sister Carmen Barsody, a former Elk River resident and co-founder with Rev. Kay Jorgensen of San Francisco’s Faithful Fools Street Ministry, deals with homelessness every day at her mission in the Tenderloin District.

“The Tenderloin is the part of San Francisco you’re told not to go to,” said Barsody.

However, since 1998 Barsody and the Faithful Fools have enticed 1500 individuals to spend a day in the Tenderloin on a street retreat.

Meeting the homeless forces individuals to “acknowledge the human being” behind the disheveled appearance, said Barsody.

The play “The Witness” grew out of the Faithful Fools mission. After attending a retreat, playwright Martha Boesing, a native Minnesotan, transformed her experiences into a one-woman play, which has since toured in California, Texas and Vancouver.

The main character is Tracy, a middleclass homeowner and soup kitchen volunteer, whose enlightened ideals are tested when a homeless man appears outside her house. To get rid of him, she recycles his cardboard box.

On Sunday, actor Rebecca Noon played Tracy and three supporting characters: Tracy’s friend George, Aunt Wendy and a Faithful Fool.

George, the activist, scorns Faithful Fools’ mission. “They’re not doing anything for homelessness,” he says. “They’re just talking to people.”

But getting to know the homeless is the point of Barsody’s mission and the play. Only through encounters like the one Tracy has with Suzanne, a retired nurse forced onto the streets by increasing rent prices, do individuals recognize their common humanity.

At the play’s close, actor Noon walked down the aisle of Central Lutheran and handed out pieces of bread. The distribution of food segued into a question and answer session, during which audience members shared stories.

One member had witnessed the endemic poverty of Guadalajara’s inner city. Others knew of middle-class professionals like Suzanne who had ended up on the street.

But homelessness is not a problem that goes on outside our area, said Rev. Trish Greeves, who as minister of Elk River’s Union Church has met transients stopping at the church for food.

“We used to have one man who would ride to church lunches on his bicycle,” she said. “You’d start talking to him and suddenly you’d realize he had a girlfriend and wasn’t much different from everyone else.”

Journalist

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